In 2004, Jon Seaton went door to door for Bush-Cheney with a clipboard. Can the president count on your support? Great. I can get you a yard sign. There were never enough yard signs. Somewhere in Arlington there are probably still boxes of those sheets, every answer written in pen.
Jon and I came up together in Bush world — him in the field, me on the communications side. He went on to run John McCain’s national field program, advise Lindsey Graham and launch Echo Canyon Consulting, named Best New Firm at this year’s Reed Awards. This week he came on The Friday Reporter to compare notes, four weeks out from the midterms.
The clipboard is gone. It all happens on a phone now, and a campaign knows more about a voter before the knock than we used to learn after it. Jon gives Karl Rove the credit. Rove decided grassroots could be measured like money raised or quotes in the paper: doors knocked, voters reached, events attended, every single day. That idea built the modern campaign. It also built every corporate and issue campaign in Washington that actually works.
So you’d expect a guy who sells canvassing data to swear by the numbers.
He doesn’t, entirely. Jon isn’t anti-analytics, but politics is a people business, and no forecaster can stand in 50 congressional districts at once. He reads Google Trends. He watches the national environment. Then he gets out to Phoenix or Texas, sits down at a restaurant and talks to whoever is next to him. Everybody jokes about the vibes, he told me. The vibes can tell you a lot.
What he hears out there isn’t what Washington is chasing. Not one person in Phoenix has brought up the White House ballroom with him. They want to afford groceries and gas. The campaigns that miss it are the ones that are entirely too online, chasing the outrage of the day because it feels like catnip. His fix is almost too simple. Take Twitter off your phone and listen.
I’ve worked the last four weeks of a race the same way for years. I don’t listen to Washington. I call my friends outside the Beltway.
On Election Day, Jon sends one tweet: What are you hearing? Then he waits like the rest of us, with the whole thing finally in the voters’ hands.
Notable Quotes
“They joke about the vibes, but the vibes can tell you a lot.” — Jon Seaton
“I don’t know one person in Phoenix, Arizona that cares about what the Kennedy Center is called.” — Jon Seaton
“You can question their judgment. You shouldn’t question their motives.” — Jon Seaton, on what he learned from John McCain
Takeaway
The data tells a campaign which door to knock on. The person who answers tells it what’s actually going on. Four weeks out, Jon Seaton is still listening for both.
